Legal experience and views on Trump define Colorado attorney general’s race

The Democrat running for Colorado attorney general has barely practiced law, but became a household name in the state through years of media appearances in which she attacks President Donald Trump’s policies on, well, pretty much everything.

Her Republican opponent has practiced law for 20 years, tried or overseen hundreds of cases and scarcely mentions Trump on the campaign trail.

Coloradans are now deciding what’s more important to them in the person they choose to manage one of the state’s largest law firms: legal experience, or a willingness to fight with the president?

Republican El Paso District Attorney Michael Allen has led an office with more than 250 people for more than five years. He led the prosecution of one of the state’s most recent mass shootings. He’s worked as a prosecutor since passing the bar exam 20 years ago. He’s presided over cases. He’s managed legal teams in civil and criminal court.

But his politics lean conservative, and may not reflect the majority of the state’s electorate. Still, given voters’ willingness to elect Republicans to the top legal job even as the governor’s office has become nearly exclusively the domain of Democrats, Allen thinks he has a case to make.

Republican Colorado attorney general candidate Michael Allen speaks during a debate with Democratic candidate Jena Griswold, hosted by The Colorado Sun in partnership with Noticias Univision Colorado at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs on Oct. 14, 2026, in Denver. (Cheney Orr, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

“I’ve got the right experience to lead the attorney general’s office into the future and to fight for all of your rights,” Allen told a room full of people at a debate at the University of Denver recently. “And those rights, by the way, are not partisan rights. They are rights that you hold dear, and I will fight for them every single day as your attorney general.”

Democrat Jena Griswold, now the secretary of state, has been in her job for eight years. She was, at the time of her first election at 34, the youngest secretary of state in the country. Her legal experience before that was thin. She represented Colorado and Gov. John Hickenlooper in Washington, D.C. for a time, and worked as a consultant at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing. After passing the bar exam in October 2011, she worked for 18 months at Paul Hastings LLP, a private international law firm in Washington D.C.

That relatively small sliver of legal experience in Griswold’s biography leaves questions both Allen and her primary opponents raised about how she would handle the AG’s office with a staff north of 700 people – many of them among the state’s most experienced trial lawyers. The AG runs the statewide grand jury, manages the Peace Officers Standards and Training board (which certifies law enforcement officers), handles consumer protection, controls the offices that defend state agencies and manages civil cases all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court when necessary.

Griswold, who as secretary of state manages a staff of about 150, has repeatedly rebuffed questions about her legal experience by noting on the campaign trail that the state’s top lawyer doesn’t really try cases in court. 

“The AG is not a trial attorney,” Griswold said at the same DU debate hosted by the Colorado Sun and Noticias Univision Colorado. “The last attorney general who was in court trying a case was in the 1860s. That is not the job.”

Democratic Colorado attorney general candidate Jena Griswold speaks during a debate with Republican candidate Michael Allen, hosted by The Colorado Sun in partnership with Noticias Univision Colorado at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs on Oct. 14, 2026, in Denver. (Cheney Orr, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)

The contrasts between Griswold and Allen are not just about experience. They have real policy differences that neither shy away from, on the environment and climate change, on challenging federal immigration enforcement and on defending the state’s gun control measures.

Griswold was born in Ohio but moved to the Estes Park area when she was a child. On the campaign trail, she often talks about her family being poor, living on food stamps and visiting food banks. She eventually went to Whitman College and then the University of Pennsylvania law school. She often says on the campaign trail that she’s still paying off her education debt. Griswold is married with a toddler and lives in Louisville.

Common themes from Griswold’s stump speech include preserving mail ballot access in Colorado, fighting corporations and companies that pollute the state and protecting reproductive rights. 

“I’m running for Attorney General to stand up to MAGA and Donald Trump to protect our state and protect our rights,” Griswold said at a recent campaign event in Aurora. “I want to make sure every Coloradan gets the same opportunity I was given, a chance at a good education and a good-paying job.”

Allen was born and raised in Colorado. A child of divorced parents, he grew up in the Denver suburbs and had deep relationships with his grandparents, who helped raise him. After graduating from Arvada West High School, he enlisted in the Navy and served as an aviation technician until he was honorably discharged in 1998.

He then went to the University of Northern Colorado for undergraduate studies and the University of Kansas for law school. He stayed in Kansas for a few years and worked as a “baby prosecutor” before moving back to Colorado with his family. 

CPR News asked to attend campaign events Allen was attending for nearly two months and his campaign could never find anything. 

Instead of the higher-profile events Griswold has participated in, like a statewide bus tour with other Democratic candidates, Allen has run more of a low-key campaign focused on small group meetings with voters – mostly not far from his home.

His campaign staffers point out he’s hard to schedule given he didn’t take a leave of absence running the 4th Judicial District, which is an “8 a.m. to 8 p.m.” kind of job. 

Still, in multiple media interviews, forums and a large debate, policy differences between Allen and Griswold have emerged. 

Allen has said on the campaign trail he disagrees with the state’s decision to support Boulder’s lawsuit against oil and gas companies citing the effects of climate change and eventual costs to local counties and municipalities. That case was recently argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Allen said he didn’t support the lawsuit and he wouldn’t have filed a brief in favor of it, like current Attorney General Phil Weiser did.

In answering the question at a recent forum, Allen gave a potential peek into how he would approach civil litigation as the state’s top lawyer.

“I don’t think that you make important decisions like that that affect millions of Coloradans through tort lawsuits filed by a particular city,” he said. “You allow people that are being affected across the state of Colorado to have a say in what’s happening. You don’t leave a decision like that in the hands of a particular city and let one judge make a decision that will affect all six million Coloradans across the state.”

Griswold disagreed.

“You know, growing up close to Rocky Mountain National Park, I really value everything that makes Colorado, Colorado, our open lands, the beautiful state, and will do everything in my power as attorney general to make sure that our beautiful natural resources and outdoors are protected for years to come,” she said. 

Allen has said that Weiser has used the office – particularly his almost 90 lawsuits against the Trump administration – in a political way. When asked in interviews and at campaign events which lawsuits he specifically disagreed with, though, he mostly said he needed to assess them all on their own merits. 

Allen did say he wouldn’t have sued Trump for relocating Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Ala. in 2025.

“We can disagree or not, and we can like it or not, but President Trump is the commander-in-chief. That means he is in charge of our armed forces, and he gets to pick, unfortunately, where he’s going to make our military units be stationed,” Allen said. “Now, I disagree entirely with the decision. I think it should have stayed in Colorado Springs.”

Griswold pounces on this to portray Allen as a Trump loyalist.

“It is illegal and unconstitutional to retaliate against the state,” she said. “It is not partisan to fight against it, it’s patriotic. That’s exactly what we should be doing.”

But even amid the disagreement over policy, Allen weaponizes Griswold’s lack of legal experience.

“What you do is you start with the evidence and you start with the law, and you see where that goes,” Allen said. “My opponent, on the other hand, starts with the conclusion and works backwards and looks for ways to be hyper-partisan in her approach.”

Griswold likes to point out that Allen also has not been outspoken about Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in Colorado. That includes even when an ICE agent fired shots at a vehicle in his jurisdiction in the summer of 2025.

Immigration officials reported that at a workforce raid in unincorporated El Paso County in July 2025 one of the agency’s officers fired three shots at a vehicle that had attempted to ram into an ICE vehicle.

The vehicle reportedly had two men inside and one eventually turned himself in and the other fled, officials said.

Normally, when a law enforcement officer in the field fires shots, an independent investigation is convened with other local authorities that weren’t involved in the shooting at the time. 

That didn’t happen in this situation and Allen didn’t publicly call for a state review at the time. Allen said that decision doesn’t belong to his office and he wouldn’t be able to both be an investigator and a legal reviewer. 

“The incident in question involved federal law enforcement officers who were conducting a federal operation,” he said, in an email. “To our knowledge, no injuries resulted from the incident, and the matter was never referred to the district attorney’s office for investigation or review.” 

At the time, federal officials said they would handle an independent review but there has been no information released on the status of that investigation. CPR News filed a federal Freedom Of Information Act request for any details on the case at the end of 2025 and it has gone unanswered.

Allen maintains that whether a federal investigation occurred is a question appropriate for the feds – not his office. Allen did note he is evaluating how other DAs around the state would have dealt with a similar incident.

“I’m looking at how others would have handled the situation,” he said, in an interview.

He noted that “reflects his willingness to evaluate existing practices, not an acknowledgement that his office failed to act.”

Griswold tells supporters she worries about Allen’s lack of concern about tactics employed by immigration officers in the state.

“I will do everything I can to stop the illegalities from this administration and how ICE is being used as a tool to terrorize Americans,” she said. “They are not respecting due process. I will fight to make sure we do not have more detention centers. I will fight to make sure that if an atrocity happens in the state of Colorado, we have an impartial investigation so that there is justice.”

When asked about immigration broadly, Allen’s answers typically center around his personal story, that his grandparents are from the San Luis Valley, are Hispanic and so is his mother. He says he has no tolerance for discrimination.

“Discrimination policy should never be immigration policy,” he said. “And I will always stand up with my people, Hispanic people or anybody else that is being victimized by anybody in the state of Colorado, whether it’s the federal government, a state actor, a law enforcement agency, or what have you.”

Griswold calls the answer dissatisfying.

“Who are you going to trust?” she said. “My opponent is refusing to answer very simple questions, and I want to make it very clear that the fundamental role of the next attorney general is to stand up between immigrant communities and ICE.”

Taking another swipe at experience, Allen answered, “if you’re going to fly on an airplane from here to Europe and you get on the plane and you find out that the person flying that plane has never flown a plane in their life, you’re probably turning around and getting off that plane,” he said.

“Well, we shouldn’t be hiring a lawyer in the same way.”